Rare issues of the Chinese Advertiser and English and Chinese Advertiser have recently been acquired and will be digitalised by The Ballarat Library.

Research librarian Edith Fry says they're a lucky find because they're the only known copies of these issues from the early gold-rush period.

"The Chinese Advertiser is probably the first Australian-Chinese newspaper every published and the English Chinese Advertiser which followed straight on is the only bilingual newspaper perhaps printed anywhere in the world of Chinese with another language."

She says it's a shame that many newspapers which are important to the country's history have gone missing because they were ephemeral.

"They were just used by the butcher to wrap up meat, or the fish and chip guy or to light the fire," Edith says.

The papers were published in Ballarat by Englishman Robert Bell in 1856, when thousands of Chinese people were arriving at the goldfields.

While it was at a time when Chinese immigrants encountered racist attitudes and the anti-Chinese poll tax which resulted in many of them making the trip to the goldfields from South Australia on foot, the paper doesn't reflect any unrest or ill-feeling.

"Largely they're made up of advertisements, they also published the government notices and help with the English language and they also published excerpts from the bible.

"There's not a great history of unrest in Ballarat...perhaps Bell's newspaper did do quite a bit towards bringing a bit of cross-cultural understanding between the Chinese and the English."

Bell studied Chinese language for four years; something which Edith says set him apart from the other European settlers.

"He was considered extremely eccentric and he was actually nicknamed Chinese Bell."